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Academic Affairs

‘My Education,’ by Susan Choi

Susan Choi’s new novel starts out on familiar territory: the attraction between a precocious young woman and an intellectually charismatic older man. Regina is a 21-year-old graduate student taking literature classes at an unnamed East Coast university; Nicholas Brodeur is her celebrated professor, graced with “exceptional, even sinister, attractiveness.” Yet “My Education,” Choi’s fourth book, only feints toward the conventional novel, with the standard affair between student and professor. Just when Regina and Nicholas seem about to sleep together, he is superseded in Regina’s affections by his 33-year-old wife, Martha, on maternity leave from a teaching position at the same university. One night at a dinner party, Regina trails the older woman out the back door and kisses her, and we find ourselves on a less familiar campus than we’d thought.

The unfolding relationship between the two women, one of exuberant passion on Regina’s part and guilty ambivalence on Martha’s, takes up most of this elegantly written book. Regina’s affair with her professor’s wife is not, however, the only romance here; it inaugurates a fugal series of couplings, with characters swapping partners according to the harmonic logic of desire and rejection. Martha will eventually sleep with a close male friend and former lover of Regina’s; Regina will soon after begin a short affair with Nicholas. In the book’s final section, which takes place 15 years after the principal action, Regina will find herself in a position not too different from Martha’s once upon a time, as a woman no longer exactly young, bound by obligations to a husband, a career and a child. Regina, facing the complexities of adult love — at once deeper and more banal than those of youthful infatuation — must strike her own grown-up bargain between what she has and what she wants. As a younger person, she believed “desire was duty,” refusing to “grasp that desire and duty could rival each other, least of all that they most often do.” She knows better now.

Choi has taken seriously the sexual love between two women who see themselves as straight. This choice of subject matter is an exciting one, for if a number of the great novels of the past century have been stories of gay love, no really adequate literature of bisexuality exists. Regina does not concern herself with the terms “lesbian” or “bisexual,” and she is nonchalant about the sex of her new lover. It was “the least relevant factor of all,” she maintains, “that we were both women.” Her determination to bracket gender is momentarily persuasive. Her “adoration” of Martha is, she feels, “its own totality, bottomless and consuming, a font of impossible pleasure that from the start also bore down on me like a drill until at last it accomplished a permanent perforation.” In love of great intensity and depth the specificity of the beloved can overwhelm any category he or she belongs to — and Regina swears that her feeling for Martha is “so unto itself it could not refer outward, to other affairs between women or even between human beings.” The question is whether it refers outward to, or connects significantly with, the rest of her own life.

Photo

Susan ChoiCredit
Lili Holzer-Glier for The New York Times

Regina’s rhapsodies make her sound very young, and this is the point; Martha, the seasoned adult, must knock — or caress — some sense into her naïve lover. She invokes the prosaic demands the 21-year-old has never suffered in order to explain why things between them will never work out, and teaches Regina — by hurting her — that the single-minded force of a girl’s love “never lasts.” For Choi, the novelistically productive problem is in the differing life stages of the two women. Regina’s grand self-obliteration is something an older person simply isn’t capable of: “Whatever I feel,” Martha says, “I don’t feel it the way that you do.” Martha cares for Regina but also uses her to get out of her marriage. She is calculating because calculation is what adulthood requires. Regina, on the other hand, is no more practical than to briefly and foggily imagine a future household in which Martha substitutes for the husband she once pictured. After she and Martha split up she does not look at other women in a new sexual light, and in the final section of the book there is no evidence that in 15 years she has ever done so.

“My Education” wants to present the love between two women as first and foremost the love between two human beings. Lovers’ gender, Choi suggests, says little about emotional experience. This isn’t quite untrue, and you wouldn’t wish for a novel bogged down in identity politics. But there is something suspect about Regina’s claim that she didn’t love Martha “for being a woman, and would have loved her no less had Shakespearean whim turned her into a man.” Several earnestly heated sex scenes, for one, suggest otherwise. For even if psychologically we may ignore the facts of the body, sexually we depend upon them. Nor has a society yet come into being, even on university campuses, in which we can ignore the sex of our lovers. “My Education” wants us to see this woman’s love affair with another woman as shattering. But the singularity of Regina’s feelings undermines, rather than establishes, their consequentiality. If it doesn’t matter that Regina’s choice of partner is a woman, why is she one?

Falling in love, of course, doesn’t feel like a choice. And there is a true-seeming helplessness to the women’s attraction. Yet the reader wants to feel a similar inevitability about the novel as a whole. Two of Choi’s previous books, “American Woman” (2003) and “A Person of Interest” (2008), take their inspiration in part from real people — Patty Hearst and Wendy Yoshimura in the first case, Ted Kaczynski and Wen Ho Lee in the second — and these stories too seem oddly unmotivated, as if Choi’s subject matter, like the sex of Regina’s lover, is curiously optional. The high stakes of the real-world conflicts that inform these novels are sometimes replaced, in the fictional versions, by lower stakes. In “American Woman,” for example, a robbery that ends up costing a life isn’t undertaken to make an ideological point but simply for economic survival, and in “A Person of Interest,” Kaczynski’s idealistic rage is transposed by Choi into careerism: the fictional bomber kills his targets because he begrudges their success. “My Education” shows a similar timidity with the relevant political stakes, perhaps to similarly apolitical effect. Bisexuality has little social consequence, after all, when it’s wrapped in heterosexual identity. And the affair’s psychological effects on Regina, though made much of at the time, don’t reverberate deeply into her adulthood. She stays with her husband and child, whom she loves. The lesson she’s learned about duty is a conservative one: it teaches you what shouldn’t change.

Choi is a graceful, perceptive writer, and all of her novels are striking for the visual beauty of her descriptions. At the same time, the somewhat indiscriminate attentiveness of her prose tends to plane smooth the texture of her narratives. A trivial dinner conversation in Choi’s hands receives the same careful scrutiny as a life-altering betrayal. The effect, in the end, is of a keen but somewhat purposeless talent. The more sweepingly Choi applies her considerable gifts, the more difficult it is to say what particularly matters to this writer and why.

MY EDUCATION

By Susan Choi

296 pp. Viking. $26.95.

Emily Cooke is a senior editor at The New Inquiry.

A version of this review appears in print on July 21, 2013, on Page BR9 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Academic Affairs. Today's Paper|Subscribe